i am really really worried
i have some mercury fillings from when i was a kid and i had pain in my bottom teeth.
i went to the dentist who drilled out one of the mercury fillings and replaced it not with mercury....
i have since read that you shouldnt do that with mercury filling and it can posion you and as i am also BF i am panicking
anyone know anything about it?

they did have a suction hose to suction it all out but what if i swollowed any??

I'm in the UK. I had a mercury filling drilled out and replaced with another mercury one during my pregnancy with DD. I was 16 weeks pregnant. There have been no visible harmful effects of this so far.

I understand now that it isn't recommended for pregnant women to have fillings done during pregnancy, but in the UK dental care is free during pregnancy and for the first year post partum, so i know very few women who DIDN'T get some sort of dental work done during pregnancy or nursing, purely because it's free then (and expensive at other times).

Well, at this point it's done, so try not to beat yourself up about it. You did get extra mercury exposure, we get a spike in exposure upon both placement and removal.

Mercury's not healthy for anyone, but the risk of amalgam removal in mom varies widely from one mother-child nursing pair to another. If it were me and one of my kids, it would've been seriously bad news, but another person? Barely a ripple in their health.

The biggest risk comes from a mom who doesn't excrete mercury well, because we birth babies with a high toxic load and an impaired ability to excrete new toxins (heavy metals or anything else). For me, one of the best ways to figure that out was to look at my health history in relation to when my amalgams were placed. I developed enviro allergies (dust, pollen, dog fur, basic stuff) within a short time period after my amalgams were placed--my anxiety started then too.

If you read some of the studies at iaomt.org, you'll get an idea of the more-typical and less-typical types of health problems that can be related to amalgams. My combo of allergies, anxiety, depression, and thyroid problems, plus a lot of more general fatigue, is classic, but there are other patterns.

Two more places to read about this, and see if it's a health issue for you (looking at family health history can be helpful, I see related issues going back several generations), is the frequent dose chelation yahoo group and the autism mercury yahoo group. The Files of both lists are helpful.

In the meantime, I'd focus on nutrients. We use up nutrients to get this stuff out of our bodies. A good multivit (Thorne has Basic Nutrients multivits and separate mineral supplements) is a good start, extra vitamin C, plus nutrient dense food, thinking about foods that supply stuff like folate and zinc and magnesium, and foods that _don't_ irritate you in other ways--for example, I knew for years dairy didn't really agree with me, I just didn't do much about it.

Here's a page that discusses nutrients and how we excrete metals and other substances...

But at this point, worrying will hurt more than it helps. I don't know if it was totally clear up top, but not everyone ends up with health issues like I have due to their amalgams. But using this as an opportunity to look at your health strengths and weaknesses, whatever they are, and how your family health history is playing out through the generations, and making changes (whether mercury-related or not) could yield good, long-term benefits.